Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
Thank you for the invitation to appear before you today on Bill C-46. I'm accompanied by Madam Kosseim. As you may be aware, we appeared before the public safety and national security committee, SECU, on a similar private member's bill, C-226, a year ago. I would stress from the outset that our office fully understands the severity, societal impact, and clear dangers of impaired driving. For governments and law enforcement, combatting impaired driving is clearly a compelling state objective, given the tragic impact on Canadians each year.
In our testimony before SECU last September on the other bill, we acknowledged the pressing nature of the state objective but also posed three questions related to the necessity and proportionality of the new provisions. Those questions included consideration of how invasive this new power could be, how necessary it is to move away from the suspicion standard, and whether there is any concrete evidence as to how effective the proposed changes might be.
In the interim, since our last testimony and the introduction of this bill, the government published a charter statement and a legislative backgrounder, which attempt to deal with these questions. While we might disagree on some particulars, for instance on the reasonable expectation of privacy of individuals subjected to new mandatory roadside testing, on the whole we find these explanations satisfactory.
For instance, these materials provide information on the limitations of the current system in Canada and the effectiveness of models outside Canada in reducing deaths due to impaired driving. On the whole, we think that the government's answers to our questions on necessity and proportionality, if not perfect, are in most ways adequate.
All that said, however, there are some other substantive privacy issues we would like to raise, including the broadening of purposes for which test results and analyses of bodily samples can be shared and how this sensitive data would be handled.
Clause 15 of the bill, which would add subsection 320.36(2) to the Criminal Code, permits the sharing of the results of any evaluation, physical coordination test or analysis of a bodily substance for the purpose of the administration or enforcement of a federal or provincial act.
Currently, the use and disclosure of this type of information is restricted to specific Criminal Code, Aeronautics Act or Railway Safety Act offences, or to the administration or enforcement of provincial law.
As a consequence, the bill would widen the potential uses and purposes for which such results may be put by authorities.
While road safety is clearly a compelling state objective, we do not see how the numerous other administrative objectives would justify the sharing of test results.
In your study, we recommend that the committee examine which specific laws are contemplated here and consider restricting sharing to the enforcement of statutes with sufficiently compelling state objectives that justify sharing sensitive information originally obtained without grounds.
If you are not convinced, you could limit sharing under the system in the subsection in question only to federal or provincial laws dealing with transportation security.
We would also ask whether testing results are retained on individuals who are not found to be in violation of the regulatory limits.
Unrestricted retention of negative test results or false positives would represent a privacy risk if clear ground rules around their required destruction are not set in advance.
Thank you for the invitation. I look forward to answering your questions.